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      ‘GNX’ Review: Kendrick Lamar Heads Back to His Comfort Zone on Surprise Album

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      After a war of words with Drake that yielded one of the biggest hits of Lamar’s career, the Los Angeles rapper is eager to shift back on his sixth album.Every so often, Kendrick Lamar steps into the present.The rapper, 37, is so mindful of hip-hop history, his role in it and the internal logic of the genre that it often seems like he’s performing on a different playing field than his ostensible peers. He’s a man on an island, and contentedly so.That’s part of what made his feud with Drake, which began in March and stretched through the spring and summer, so bracing. Not only did it place Lamar in the immediate present, and with real stakes on the line, but it underscored a streak of apparent disgust and resentfulness that emerges anytime he’s being pulled into the now. What’s happening in the moment is in essence a distraction from Lamar’s larger creative mission.His eventual triumph in the tug of war was led by the mainstream success of “Not Like Us,” one of the most popular songs of his career and, more important, an immediate contribution to the cultural zeitgeist. It was Lamar using Drake’s typical weapons against him — an acknowledgment that even if Lamar prefers not to pay attention to prevailing winds, he can ride them if need be.From a distance, “GNX,” his sixth album, which was released with no announcement on Friday, has some of that same immediacy. On the two opening tracks, “Wacced Out Murals” and “Squabble Up,” Lamar is rapping with the seething indignation he weaponized so effectively during the beef: “I’ll kill ’em all before I let ’em kill my joy”; “Before I take a truce, I’ll take him to hell with me.”But this is only one part of what Lamar is doing on “GNX,” an impressive but slight collection of flag-planting thumpers, puffed-chest posse cuts, conceptual experiments and moments of introspection — though nowhere near the intense internal interrogation of his last album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” It’s a palate cleanse of a sort, potentially casting off the last dregs of the Drake kerfuffles, and also, given its thematic unevenness, potentially a place holder between more substantive releases. Drake is, at most, a spectral presence on this album — there’s nothing as savagely personal as “Meet the Grahams,” the vicious salvo Lamar released in May. Lamar appears keen to move on.But what that means is that he’s eager to move back — back in time, back into history, back into his comfort zones. Taken literally, that’s Los Angeles, a city with rich musical history that Lamar has been scrupulously updating for over a decade now.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charles Dumont, Who Wrote Enduring Melodies for Édith Piaf, Dies at 95

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      His dozens of songs included “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” a powerful anthem of redemptive love that became one of Piaf’s signature songs.Charles Dumont, who wrote the music for “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the soaring song about sweeping away the past to find love anew that the hallowed but troubled singer Édith Piaf turned into an anthem of French culture, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Paris. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter Sherkane Dumont.Mr. Dumont had a prolific career, writing melodies for the likes of Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco and Barbra Streisand and music for French television and film. In the 1970s, he embarked on an award-winning career as romantic crooner.Still, it was the roughly 30 songs that he, with the lyricist Michel Vaucaire, wrote for Piaf — the diminutive and radiant chanteuse known as the Little Sparrow — that, by his own admission, defined his career. “My mother gave birth to me, but Édith Piaf brought me into the world,” Mr. Dumont said in a 2015 interview with Agence France-Presse.“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (“No, I Regret Nothing”), introduced in 1960, became a definitive song for a definitive French singer, a woman who became not just a global star but also a cultural ambassador for her country.With its martial solemnity, the song had the feel of a patriotic anthem, which gave power and drama to lyrics that express, in blunt and defiant terms, a rejection of past memories, both good and bad, while moving toward a new future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Does the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä Deserve His Meteoric Rise?

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      The 28-year-old maestro, entrusted with two storied ensembles, visited Carnegie Hall with the superb Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.A raucously received performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday was the latest exclamation point in the conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s meteoric rise. Mäkelä is just 28 and made his Carnegie debut a mere eight months ago with the Orchestre de Paris — one of the two very good ensembles he currently leads.He returned to the hall this week for a two-night stand with the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam — one of the two much-better-than-very-good ensembles he is set to take over in the coming years. (The news came in April that he would also be the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)Chicago and the Concertgebouw are more than excellent groups; they are cultural treasures, whose futures have been placed in the hands of a maestro who was widely unknown six years ago. It is safe to say that no conductor in modern history has been entrusted with so much at such a young age.Does he deserve it? With the physically extroverted Mäkelä bobbing, digging, punching and thwacking them on, the Concertgebouw’s musicians played superbly. By coincidence, the Berlin Philharmonic, another world-class ensemble, had visited Carnegie a few days before, and provided a useful comparison: Berlin’s kaleidoscopically colored, richly muscular force was distinct from the Concertgebouw’s blended and refined (though still sumptuous) elegance.It’s a luxurious sound, with full, liquid winds, discreetly burnished brasses and, best of all, sustained, velvety strings. Those strings had a beautifully restrained showcase joining Lisa Batiashvili in a hushed arrangement of a Bach chorale after her performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday. And they were fevered yet lucid in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” on Saturday.Yet in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83

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      Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple “Alice’s Restaurant” was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts.Alice Brock, whose eatery in western Massachusetts was immortalized as the place where “you can get anything you want” in Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 antiwar song “Alice’s Restaurant,” died on Thursday in Wellfleet, Mass. — just a week before Thanksgiving, the holiday during which the rambling story at the center of the song takes place. She was 83.Viki Merrick, her caregiver, said she died in a hospice from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ever since Mr. Guthrie released the song, officially called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” in 1967, it has been a staple of classic-rock stations every late November, not to mention car trip singalongs on the way to visit family for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself. Over the course of a little more than 18 minutes, Mr. Guthrie — doing more talking than singing — recounts a visit that he and a friend, Rick Robbins, paid to Ms. Brock and her husband, Ray Brock, for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock with Mr. Guthrie in 1977. They met when she was a school librarian and he was a student.Peter Simon Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst LibrariesA shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead. The next morning the police arrest them for littering, and Ms. Brock has to bail them out.That night she cooks them all a big meal, and the following day they appear in court, where the judge fines them $50. Later, Mr. Guthrie is ordered to an Army induction center, where he is able to avoid the draft because of his criminal record.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’: K-Pop Trained Rosé to Be ‘a Perfect Girl.’ Now She’s Trying to Be Herself.

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      South Korean pop, known as K-pop, is not just a type of music — it’s a culture, where bold style, perfectly choreographed dance moves and ebullient earworms that draw from pop, hip-hop and traditional Korean music attract a huge and particularly devoted global fan base. The genre’s stars, known as idols, are trained, often for years, by entertainment companies that then place the most promising trainees in groups, write and produce their music and obsessively manage their public images. It’s a system that works for the idols who make it big, but it has also drawn criticism for its grueling methods, which some call exploitative.One of the biggest stars to come out of that system is Rosé. Born Roseanne Park, she trained for four years with one of K-pop’s largest agencies, YG Entertainment, eventually breaking through as part of the girl group Blackpink. Now at age 27, she is striking out on her own with her first full-length solo album, “Rosie,” which comes out on Dec. 6 from Atlantic Records. (The album’s first single, “APT.” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, is a true bop and has made history as the first track by a female K-pop artist to break into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.) She is still a member of Blackpink, and the group re-signed with YG in 2023. But after years of singing other people’s songs and performing as Rosé, which she described to me as “a character that I really worked hard on as a trainee,” writing her own songs for this solo album has made her think about where she came from and who she is, separate from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Listen to the Conversation With RoséThe Blackpink star talks about striking out on her own, away from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou’re about to release your first full-length solo album. Can you tell me what you’re feeling? Like I’ve been waiting to release this album for my whole life. I grew up listening to a lot of female artists. I used to relate to them, and they used to really get me through a lot of tough times. And so I would always dream of one day having an album myself. But I never really thought it would be realistic. I remember last year when I first began the whole process of it, I doubted myself a lot.It probably would be surprising to anyone who would look at Rosé, with all your success, with the enormous fan base that you have, to know that you doubted yourself so much. I don’t think I ever learned or trained myself to be vulnerable and open and honest. So that was the part I feared, because it was the opposite of what I was trained to do.You were born in New Zealand to South Korean immigrant parents and then you moved to Australia when you were 8. In 2012, when you were 15, you auditioned for a slot in YG Entertainment’s trainee program, which is basically a boarding school for becoming a K-pop star. It was your dad’s idea, right? Yes. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Will Remain Jailed Until Judge Rules on Third Bail Request

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      A federal judge is still weighing the music mogul’s arguments that he should be freed while awaiting trial on sex trafficking and racketeering charges.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul who has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, will remain in jail after a federal judge on Friday said he would continue to weigh arguments about Mr. Combs’s release.Judge Arun Subramanian said at a hearing that he would decide next week on Mr. Combs’s third and latest request to be released on bail.That means that Mr. Combs will, at least for now, stay at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a hulking federal facility on the Brooklyn waterfront; his trial is scheduled for May. Mr. Combs, 55, has been detained since his arrest two months ago after a nearly 10-month federal investigation. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.Mr. Combs, in tan jail clothes, entered the courtroom smiling, and mouthed “love you” to his mother and six of his children.The central question of the hearing was whether he could be trusted to follow his lawyers’ commands and follow the specifications of his release if granted bail. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Combs of contacting grand jury witnesses, paying a potential witness to make a statement in his favor and attempting to use three-way phone calls from jail to contact associates whom prosecutors consider part of his “criminal enterprise.”The judge queried both sides closely, noting some evidence that Mr. Combs had not fully obeyed his lawyers, while also indicating some skepticism of the government’s argument that he was trying to obstruct the case from jail. (That included an allegation that Mr. Combs had orchestrated a social media post on his birthday that prosecutors said was intended to influence potential jurors.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Playlist That’s as Cool as Kim Deal

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      Hear tracks from her first solo album, the Breeders, Pixies and more.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesDear listeners,Today marks an occasion four decades in the making: the indie-rock icon Kim Deal, at age 63, is releasing her first ever solo album, a collection of woozy pop ballads and distorted rockers titled “Nobody Loves You More.”Deal is best known as the bassist of Pixies (and an indelible backing vocalist: “Where Is My Mind?” just wouldn’t be the same without her high, haunting “oohs”) and the frontwoman of the Breeders (the ’90s themselves just wouldn’t have been the same without the inventive and infectious sound of “Last Splash”). Her voice is inimitable; in her recently published profile of Deal, my editor Caryn Ganz describes it quite vividly as sounding “like cotton candy cut with paint thinner.”A lot of people in rock bands want to seem cool, and they will spend much of their energy (and wardrobe budgets) attempting to telegraph their coolness to the audience: think tattoos, tight leather and lots of posturing. Kim Deal has always been the other kind of cool. She’s not in-your-face about it. She smiles more often than she sneers. She seems to have an innate sort of self-acceptance of who she is and does not care what you think at all.Tanya Donelly, who started the Breeders with Deal, once recalled catching some early Pixies shows, when Deal would often come straight from work and play bass in “skirt-suits and office pumps.” Everyone else in the scene was trying to dress as outrageously as possible, she said, “and meanwhile the coolest person there is dressed like a secretary. I have to say, in a day it changed my perception of what was cool.”*In honor of her debut solo album, today’s playlist is a tribute to Kim Deal’s particular kind of cool. In addition to a few tracks from the new album, it places some of her best-known songs alongside deeper cuts from bands like the Amps, Sonic Youth and This Mortal Coil. I hope it inspires you to check out “Nobody Loves You More” in its entirety; it’s truly worth the wait.Let’s have a ball,Lindsay*In one of my favorite moments from Ganz’s profile, a dissenting opinion comes from Kim’s twin and fellow Breeder Kelley Deal: “She’s not that [expletive] cool to me.” Leave it to a sister to keep your ego in check!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jack Harlow Expands His Romantic Options, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Horsegirl, Tyla, Amber Mark and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Jack Harlow, ‘Hello Miss Johnson’The Kentucky rapper Jack Harlow sounds positively smitten on his first solo single of the year, the smooth-talking “Hello Miss Johnson.” Over a bossanova-style beat produced by his younger brother, Clay Harlow, and Aksel Arvid, Harlow chronicles a whirlwind courtship — “Let’s go to Nice and give your sister a niece” — punctuated by several chivalrous phone calls to his girl’s mother, which function as the song’s chorus. “Hello Miss Johnson, you know why I’m calling,” he raps, an obvious musical nod to Outkast. But, ever the charmer, Harlow can’t stop himself from a little maternal flirtation while he’s still on the line: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but was it you that gave to her the eyes I be lost in?” If things don’t work out with the daughter, perhaps he knows who to call. LINDSAY ZOLADZ​​Amber Mark, ‘Wait So Yeah’Pillowy, bountifully layered oohs and ahs surround Amber Mark’s invitation to spend the night in “Wait So Yeah” from a new EP, “Loosies.” The ticking, programmed beat and the profusion of looped, multitracked vocal harmonies make her recording expertise sound like romantic anticipation. JON PARELESTyla, ‘Tears’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More